


help i'm alive

by Wakefire



Series: What Doesn't Kill You (Makes You) [1]
Category: Alien Series
Genre: Body Horror, Canon What Canon, Cyborgs, Gen, Hospitals, and pretends there's no 100 years between Prometheus and Alien/s, completely screws the movie timeline, featuring: the only good part of Alien 3, future parts will include robots, just go with it, stay tuned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-31 01:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13964070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wakefire/pseuds/Wakefire
Summary: 'She had roused a couple times during the day and was still sucked in the process of contemplating whether she was actually alive. It felt like she shouldn’t still be alive.'Part 1 of ??? in a series of one-shots about a girl, androids, feelings, and being human(ish). Basically I'm taking all my favorite parts of the Alien trilogy and Prometheus/Covenant and playing with them.





	help i'm alive

It was on the fourth day that she realized she was missing an arm.

Of course, she would become aware of the number of days only later on. The first three she spent mostly in darkness, only getting glimpses of consciousness through a heavily medicated fog. She remembered the bright lights of a hospital corridor, frantic shouts of strangers around her, an alien sensation of _leaking_ and _pulling_ she couldn’t comprehend. Only on the fourth day the doctor felt safe enough to crack the veil of her medically-induced coma to check the state of her mental faculties.

She didn’t notice, at first. She was too occupied by the mask on her face and the breathing tube stuck down her throat, and the pain throbbing through her body in time with her heartbeat. It was mostly the pain that had momentarily awaken her earlier. It was so intense, so overwhelmingly _too much_ that it was hard to place. Somewhere on her left side, maybe.

Then she became aware of all the bandaging over her left shoulder, ribs, clavicles. Turning her head – which felt as strenuous as climbing a mountain – she saw plastic tubes sneaking out from under the bandages, circulating bright red blood. Alarmingly, there was no arm continuing down from the shoulder. It wasn’t hidden under the blanket, it was just _gone_. A part of her didn’t understand how because she still felt it, the lightning network of pain like every single bone in that arm had been shattered to pieces.

The doctor told her she was hooked to a ventilator due to damage to her left lung. He didn’t tell her whether her left eye was bandaged up because it was healing or because it was also gone. He didn’t need to tell her about the arm, he saw that she noticed. It was hard to hear over the beeping of all the machines, but she thought she saw him hesitantly mouth “couldn’t be salvaged” and “I’m sorry” before he left.

 

* * *

 

 The next time Jade woke up, it was night. She knew because she had fallen asleep her head tilted towards the window, where she saw darkness dotted by neon lights. There were voices in the room, but she didn’t care to listen to them, at least not at first. She had roused a couple times during the day and was still sucked in the process of contemplating whether she was actually alive. It felt like she shouldn’t still be alive.

“...but I urge you to keep your visit brief, Mr. Bishop. She’s in a fragile state”, said one of the female nurses. They all sounded the same.

“I assure you, I wouldn’t do anything to her detriment.” Jade didn’t think she recognized the voice – soft-spoken yet raspy, like he had smoked one too many cigarettes – but the name sounded distantly familiar. It piqued her interest enough to make her turn her head.

The door clicked shut as the nurse left, leaving Jade with the familiar stranger.

“Hello, Jade”, he spoke.

As her vision focused, clearer than it had been before, the figure beside her bed gained a form and a face. He was white and 40-something, largely unassuming, with brown hair swept back and a trench coat worn over a suit. And he knew her name.

“I think under the circumstances, I may call you Jade”, he continued. “I’m Michael Bishop, from Weyland-Yutani’s synthetic division. But I’m sure you already know that.”

Jade swallowed, which was cumbersome with the breathing tube. The man pulled up a chair but didn’t sit down, he merely rested his hands on its backrest.

“Between you and me, you have pulled quite a feat. We laud the security of the facility you broke into as impenetrable. Especially by a lone 17-year-old girl with no formal education. Kind of embarrassing for us, to be honest.” She must have made some kind of a face, because he smiled. “Yes, I looked into your background, I had plenty of time while you were… recuperating. I couldn’t confirm your real identity, but your digital footprint is quite extensive. Speaking of which, what is your name, really? Because Jade Shoto is obviously made up.”

Jade frowned. Mr. Bishop circled around the chair and swung over the tray attached to the bed, continuing to speak while he did so. “Don’t worry, I know you can’t talk with the breathing tube. I took measures.” He set a tablet with an attached keyboard on the tray. On the screen, there was a simple prompt box, a green cursor on a black background. “And in case you get any ideas, this doesn’t have a network adapter, you couldn’t even connect it to a printer.”

He sat down, crossed his legs and watched her expectantly while she continued to frown. “Come now. I know your right arm is still perfectly functional. I’ve got all day, or night, as it happens.”

Sensing that responding was the only way to eventually get rid of the man, Jade lifted her right hand. It trembled until she could rest her palm on the root of the keyboard. She typed slowly, with one or two fingers, slower than she probably had the first time she had laid her hands on a keyboard.

>> MY NAME IS JADE SHOTO

Mr. Bishop huffed as she pressed enter, yet he still didn’t even raise his voice. She wondered if this was actually Michael Bishop or one of the new Bishop model synthetics programmed to imitate its creator.

“Alright then”, he said. “The police and the hospital staff would like to know your real name, but it doesn’t really matter to me. I’m more interested in why you did it. Why get yourself literally torn apart over breaking into that facility when there were easier targets?”

The corner of her mouth curved upwards just a tad.

>> BC I COULD

To her surprise, Mr. Bishop chuckled, shaking his head. “Believe it or not, I actually do understand. It’s the same ambition that drove mankind to invent the wheel and the telephone and artificial intelligence. Yours is just sadly misdirected.”

Jade studied him with a by now permanent frown, wishing she had an HD camera that could catch microexpressions so she’d know what he wanted. It seemed unlikely that the director of Weyland-Yutani’s synthetic development department had come to see her just to gloat. (Unlikely, not impossible. She might have.)

Mr. Bishop stood up and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Look, you’re smart, so I don’t have to sugarcoat the situation. You’re lucid enough to have realized that your run-in with our security resulted in terrible injuries and the only thing keeping you alive are these machines. Which, incidentally, Weyland-Yutani is paying for, since you have no health insurance.”

>> IS THAT WHY YOURE HERE

>> TO PULL THE PLUG

For the first time the man looked something other than perfectly composed. She might have even called it genuine shock. “Jade, I don’t want to kill you”, he said. He gripped the metal edge of the bed with one hand. He had delicate hands, slender and nimble, of someone who hadn’t done manual labor a day in his life. “I came here to save your life.”

Jade laughed, which turned out to be a bad move. She started violently coughing around the breathing tube and the beeping on the heart rate monitor jumped up. No nurses showed up to check on her, however. Perhaps the company had paid for them for that, too.

Mr. Bishop waited patiently until she stopped coughing. “I understand why you’re skeptical. You did commit a felony breaking and entering in our facility. And you are part of a cyberterrorist gang that’s wanted in six countries. The authorities would be very eager to prosecute you, were you able to survive a trial.”

>> SUCKS 2 BE THEM

“I have come to offer a third option. Avoid death and prosecution. You’ll receive full immunity and the best doctors to fix you up. In exchange, you’ll come to work for us. You will, of course, get a very generous salary, along with housing and other benefits which I’m sure you’re aware of, given how much your group has spied on our records.”

Jade raised the eyebrow that wasn’t under bandages. On the list of possible reasons Bishop had come to see her, this was so far on the bottom that – well, this wasn’t even on the list. Perhaps in some alternate reality, if she’d been younger and a lot more naive, she would have jumped for joy at the idea that the most successful tech company in the known galaxy wanted to hire her. In that reality, she probably wasn’t lying on a hospital bed, with a machine doing most of her breathing.

She stared at him, opening and closing her remaining hand.

>> DO U THINK

>> I WANNA LIVE LIKE THIS

“No, of course not”, Mr. Bishop said. “We’ve been the leading developer of computerized prosthetics for decades. We’re working to create a fully integrated model, synthetic parts directly linked with the nervous system. A perfectly working technologically enhanced human being.”

Jade had to admit, a part of her lit up at the prospect, the part that had been building DIY roombas out of spare parts as a little kid. Cybernetic humans were a dream, like colonizing other planets or independently functioning androids had been a dream. Meaning that a lot of people thought it was simply impossible, and a couple religious organizations were protesting against it at any given time.

>> U NEED A GUINEA PIG

“I need someone who’s intelligent enough to understand what such process entails and stubborn enough to survive it”, Mr. Bishop countered. “Jade, you don’t need to die for some misguided principle. You’re far more valuable than that. We can not only make up for what you’ve lost, we can make you _better_. We have the technology.”

Jade batted liquid from her eye, wishing… Wishing that she wasn’t on opiates that dulled her judgment. Wishing that the opiates were stronger so that she could stop feeling the ghosts of dead nerve receptors. Wishing that the man’s voice wasn’t so damn soothing that she wanted to instinctively trust him, even though her brain was screaming at her not to.

And wishing she wasn’t in this goddamn situation to begin with. Why couldn’t she just be an idiot?

Mr. Bishop laid both hands on the cold metal railing and tilted his head. It was strategic, programmed. He had to be the real thing. No synth would be this manipulative.

“Say yes”, he spoke barely above a whisper. “Let me save you.”

Jade looked at him. Flexed her fingers. Unflexed.

>>

>>

>>

>> OK


End file.
